(HELP) Advice for Builders

[Dalvyn]

A few guidelines for building areas

• Do not capitalize short descriptions, but always capitalize long descriptions, and make sure they end with a dot/full stop. The short description is not always used as the subject of echoed sentences: in echoes like "Kurtulmak eats A yellow egg.", having the short description of the object "A yellow egg" capitalized is ugly. On the other hand, long descriptions are what people see when they enter a room where the mob or the object is, and should form complete sentences, starting with a capital letter and ending with a dot/full stop.
• Do not capitalize when it's not necessary. The short description of your guard should be something like "a guard", not "a Guard".
• Colourise your room descriptions, your mob short and long and extra descriptions, as well as your object short, long, and extra descriptions.
• Colourise your echoes! All mpecho, mpechoat, mpechoaround, and mpechoarea commands should be followed with a colour code. The only exception is when the text stars with a place-holder like $n, $N, $I, or $O, since they already contain a colour code. Note that, if you use one of those somewhere in the text, their colour code will carry over the next words. For example, the echo "{C0}You take $O and eats it." will have the "You take" part displayed in blue (color {C0}) and the "$O and eats it." shown in the colour of $O's short description. That might look quite ugly if $O is for example "{B0}a yellow egg". In such cases, you might want to add a colour code just after $O, to make sure that the "and eats it." part is in blue. The end result would be "{C0}You take $O {C0}and eats it.".
• Distinguish between $n and $N. Those two place-holders are related to the main actor in a program (who exactly depends on the type of program). The place-holder $n will always be replaced with $n's name. The place-holder $N, on the other hand, will be replaced either with $n's name or with $n's description, depending on whether or not $n has greeted the viewer. As a rule of thumb, always use $N in echoes so that the echo does not "give out" $n's name. Note that, in the line "mpechoaround $n $N suddenly dies.", the first $n should not be replaced with $N, as it is part of the command... only the $N is part of the text that is displayed.

Feel free to add to this thread!

[Japcil]

Was browsing and saw this, I think we should sticky it.

[Kregor]

A couple addenda, with a couple of my own thoughts:

$n vs. $N: This had to be changed a bit in the code to get the adjective echoes to work right, so, the correct way to use the N in an mpechoaround is to use @, rather than $.

For example, if part of your prog is to echo around the actor, you would use:

Code: Select all

mpechoaround $n The guard glares at @N.

The below are merely my own thoughts, but I think they add to the affect of the virtual envorinment we play in:

Room descs: Avoid using descriptions of the mobiles that will reset into the room or their actions. The reason is that if the mobile ends up gone out of the room for some reason, it looks odd to describe the position or actions of a non-existant shopkeeper, etc. Also, if there's going to be an object reset (a fountain, a big canopy bed, etc), let the object's long desc carry it, rather than putting it into the room desc as well. Otherwise, it looks a bit redundant.

Mob descs: The same rule we have for PC descriptions should apply to mobile extra descriptions: Do not put anything in the description that wouldn't apply if you found the mob dead in a ditch. Describing a stallion prancing it's hooves, or an ogre warrior giving you a furious sneer, don't really work well when the desc is strung onto its corpse.

likewise, the long desc of a mob would be better served not being personalized, eg "The town magistrate gives you a haughty look." or "The shopkeeper dusts his hands off and greets you." etc. If you aren't commanding the attention, ie, you are invis, hiding, etc., or even just scrying in to the room and seeing the mobile, then these actions in a long desc are no longer accurate.

Environmental echoes: While we would obviously not want to bog down the server with a ton of random progs triggering, I feel in some cases, that a 1% rand prog or two here and there in an area adds to the atmosphere greatly. If you would be putting a line in a room desc about the ringing of an avil in the nearby blacksmith, consider instead putting a rand prog on the blacksmith, that echoes him in the shop of hammering a piece of armor, then an mpasound of the ringing metal which sounds in the surrounding rooms. You could opt to do this with a bawdy barroom, or an arena, etc. Doing this also allows you to set the times such echoes would happen, thus not having them present and inappropriate when the places would be closed, for example.